Escape from New York

A typical, distinctive Carpenter film, as only he can do it. The low budget and the associated minimalism are enough to play a solid B-movie etude about one tough guy who stood up to everyone and fucked them all up... Kurt Russell is a man par excellence, who needs little to satisfy similarly-minded fans - the pissed-off face, synth music, and an hour and a half-long sequence of tense scenes that can be described in several pages of genre textbooks today. 4 ½. (05/16/2008)

The president’s plane crashes in Manhattan, which is a giant self-governing prison, and the biggest tough mudafucka with an eye patch has 24 hours to get him out of there like FTW. If I'd known this movie when I was a kid, I wouldn't have made it out of third grade. And I'd probably starve to death in front of the video. The ideal cure for a creative crisis, I think, would be just listening to kids play on a road carpet. (09/24/2020)

I like John Carpenter, but I found out that there are some quite essential movies he made - and that there are many of them - that I haven't seen yet. Yes, this was one of them. I was expecting it to be a little bit crazier, but I definitely wasn't disappointed. There are excellent characters here, but above all, the environment is beautifully brutal. A person evolves for so long, only for this to become of them in the end. Well, we couldn't be surprised, even though the year 1997 is successfully behind us. (03/20/2015)

Carpenter’s famous cult movie didn’t work on me. The atmosphere is fine, Russell is tough as nails, but the very premise of Manhattan as a prison (that was set up god knows why) is very silly. I know looking for logic in films of this kind is nonsense, but in Escape from New York all those inconsistencies were way too evident. (07/07/2011)

Typical John Carpenter’s madness set in an insanely looking New York as big prison, with tasteless and uninspiring action scenes, and characters that look like they've just had a stroke. The whole thing looks like one big fetish flick. We have a boxing ring, pseudo-futuristic machines, the World Trade Center, where a glider can land, all of that crowned by a tough and taciturn hero played by Kurt Russell, whom everyone knows and nobody calls anything other than Snake. It's crazy nonsense, but entertaining at times. The script is practically nonexistent and the plot is also nothing special. The only thing that stands out is precisely the cheapness and wackiness of the whole project, which is basically Carpenter's main weapon to impress the audience. (07/13/2006)